Marri Wants EC to Act against CM, CEO—Deletions from Voters List

Alleging that the TRS government has hatched a conspiracy for large scale deletion of voters in Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation area, Congress senior leader Marri Shashidhar Reddy has demanded the Election Commission to initiate strong action against the Telangana state Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao.

Speaking to the media at Gandhi Bhavan here on Monday, Marri requested the Election Commission to direct the concerned not take note of the earlier illegal deletions and not to act on the names identified for deletion, to whom notices were allegedly issued. He asked EC to depute a team to inquire into all the allegations and pending this, the CEO Bhnwarlal and DEO Somesh Kumar should be relieved from their responsibilities, and ultimately suspended from service, drawing a lesson from the UP instance in 2001. Their continuance would prejudice the outcome of the elections and any attempt to continue them is unconstitutional and un-democratic and immense damage would be caused to the process of free and fair elections as enunciated in the constitution of India. The others sub-ordinate to these two officers can be warned or transferred. Unlike, in UP in 2001 in the case of illegal deletion of voters Thakurdwara segment of Rampur Loksabha constituency, the Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao himself set a target of 15 lakh ‘bogus’ voters to be deleted in GHMC area, when he reviewed the Aadhar linkage program by summoning the CEO Bhanwarlal on July 21, 2015, he alleged.

He alleged that TRS was hatching a conspiracy targeting settlers (35 percent), Muslim Minorities (30 percent) and Hindi speaking /North Indians (10 percent). Marri said that the key conspirators were KCR, Bhanwarlal and Somesh Kumar and alleged that notices were issued to the voters and deletions made; and there were many contradictions which cannot be ignored. He said that according to Somesh Kumar–the notices have been issued to 23.34 lakh and 4.78 lakh voters were been deleted and the remaining 22.34 lakh to be deleted. He said that according to Bhanwarlal 30.64 lakh notices were issued and 6.3 lakh voters have been deleted and 10 lakh notices verified and 19 lakh notices yet to be verified.

Marri alleged that there were serious irregularities in the deletion of voters, with mala fide intentions and large-scale violation of and disregard for existing rules and provisions in a reckless and cynical manner. He claimed that all procedures followed were totally false. He asserted that the deletions were without following the procedure laid down in the rules and in disregard of the directions of the election commission. He said that in his small sample survey, he identified 234 voters in Sanathnagar constituency, whose names were illegally deleted, including three persons whose names were deleted under ‘dead’ category, who were very much alive. (NSS)